Slow Horses (3 page)

The air was immediately polluted.

Rubber-gloved, wrinkle-nosed, he got to his knees and began picking through the mess.

Eggshells, vegetable ends, coffee grounds in melting paper filters, parchment-coloured teabags, a sliver of soap, labels from jars, a plastic squeezy bottle, florets of stained kitchen towels, torn brown envelopes, corks, bottle tops, the coiled spring and cardboard back of a spiral-notepad, some bits of broken crockery which didn’t fit together, tin trays from takeaway meals, scrunched-up Post-its, a pizza box, a wrung-out tube of toothpaste, two juice cartons, an empty tin of shoe polish, a plastic scoop, and seven carefully bundled parcels made from pages of
Searchlight
.

And much else that wasn’t immediately identifiable. All of it sopping wet and glistening, sluglike, in the light of the overhead bulb.

He sat back on his haunches. Picked up the first of the
Searchlight
parcels, and unwrapped it as carefully as he could.

The contents of an ashtray fell on to the carpet.

He shook his head, and dropped the rotting newspaper back on the pile.

A sound made its way up the back stairs, and he paused, but it didn’t repeat. All entrances and exits from Slough House came via a back yard with mildewed, slimy walls, and everyone who came in made a large, unfriendly noise doing so, because the door stuck and—like most of the people using it—needed a good kicking. But this sound had been nothing like that, so he shook his head and decided it had been the building waking up; flexing its lintels or whatever old buildings did in the morning, after a night of rain. Rain he’d been out in, collecting the journalist’s rubbish.

Eggshells, vegetable ends, coffee grounds in melting paper filters …

He picked another of the paper parcels, its scrunched-up headline a denunciation of a recent BNP demo, and sniffed it tentatively. Didn’t smell like an ashtray.

‘A sense of humour can be a real bastard,’ Jackson Lamb said.

River dropped the parcel.

Lamb was leaning in the doorway, his cheeks glistening slightly as they tended to after exertion. Climbing stairs counted, though he’d not made a squeak on them. River could barely manage such stealth himself, and he wasn’t carrying Lamb’s weight: most of it gathered round his middle, like a pregnancy. A shabby grey raincoat shrouded it now, while the umbrella hooked over his arm dripped on to the floor.

River, trying to hide the fact that his heart had just punched him in the ribs, said, ‘You think he’s calling us Nazis?’

‘Well, yes. Obviously he’s calling us Nazis. But I meant you doing this on Sid’s half of the room.’

River picked up the fallen bundle but it gave way as he did so, the paper too wet to contain its contents, spilling a stew of small bones and scraped-away skin—for a nasty moment, evidence of a brutal, baby-sized murder. And then the shape of a chicken asserted itself from the collection; a misshapen chicken—all legs and wings—but recognizably a former bird. Lamb snorted. River rubbed his gloved hands together, smearing sodden lumps of newspaper into balls, then shaking them into the pile. The black and red inks wouldn’t lose their grip so easily. The once-yellow gloves turned the colour of miners’ fingers.

Lamb said, ‘That wasn’t too clever.’

Thank you for that, River thought. Thanks for pointing that out.

The previous night he’d lurked outside the journo’s past midnight, wresting what shelter he could from the slight overhang of the building opposite while rain belted down like Noah’s nightmare. Most of the neighbours had done their civic duty, black sacks lined up like sitting pigs, or council-supplied wheelie bins standing sentry by doors. But nothing outside the journo’s. Cold rain tracked down River’s neck, mapping a course to the crack of his arse, and he knew it didn’t matter how long he stood there, he was going to have no joy.

‘Don’t get caught,’ Lamb had said.

Of course I won’t get bloody caught, he’d thought. ‘I’ll try not to.’

And: ‘Residents’ parking,’ Lamb had added, as if sharing some arcane password.

Residents’ parking. So what?

So he couldn’t sit in his car, he’d belatedly realized. Couldn’t cosy down, rain bouncing off a waterproof roof, and wait for the bags to appear. The chances of a parking revenue attendant—or whatever they were called today—doing the rounds after midnight were slim, but not non-existent.

It was all he’d need—a parking ticket. On-the-spot fine. His name in a book.

Don’t get caught
.

So it was the slight overhang in the pouring rain. Worse than that, it was the flickering light behind the thin curtains of the journo’s street-level apartment; it was the way a shadow kept appearing behind them. As if the hack inside, dry as toast, was busting a gut at the thought of River in the rain, waiting for him to put his rubbish bag out so he could whip it away for covert study. As if the journo knew all this.

Not long after midnight, the thought occurred to River: maybe he did.

That was how it had been for the past eight months. Every so often, he’d take the bigger picture and give it a shake, like it was a loose jigsaw. Sometimes the pieces came together differently; sometimes they didn’t fit at all. Why did Jackson Lamb want this journo’s rubbish, enough to give River his first out-of-the-office job since he’d been assigned to Slough House? Maybe the point wasn’t getting the rubbish. Maybe the point was River standing in the rain for hours on end, while the hack laughed with Lamb about it over the phone.

This rain had been forecast. Hell, it had been raining when Lamb had given him the op.

Residents’ parking, he’d said.

Don’t get caught.

Ten more minutes, and River decided enough was enough. There was going to be no bag of rubbish, or if there was, it wasn’t going to mean anything, other than that he’d been sent on an idiot’s errand … He’d walked back the way he’d come, collecting a random rubbish sack on the way; had flung it into the boot of the car he’d parked by the nearest meter. Had driven home. Had gone to bed.

Where he’d lain for two hours, watching the jigsaw reassemble itself. Jackson Lamb’s
Don’t get caught
might have meant just that: that River had been given an important task, and mustn’t get caught. Not crucially important—if so, Lamb would have sent Sid, or possibly Moody—but important enough that it had to be done.

Or else it was a test. A test to discover whether River was capable of going out in the rain and bringing back a bag of rubbish.

He went out again not long after, abandoning the random sack of rubbish in the first litter bin he passed. Cruising slowly past the journo’s, he could hardly believe it was there, slumped against the wall below the window: a knotted black bag …

The same bag’s contents were now strewn across the floor in front of him.

Lamb said, ‘I’ll leave you to clear that, right?’

River said, ‘What am I looking for precisely?’

But Lamb was already gone; audible on the stairs, this time—every creak and complaint echoing—and River was alone in Sid’s half of the office; still surrounded by unsweet-smelling crap, and still weighed down by the faint but unmistakable sensation of being Jackson Lamb’s punchbag.

The tables were always packed too close in Max’s, in optimistic preparation for a rush of custom that wasn’t going to happen. Max’s wasn’t popular because it wasn’t very good; they re-used the coffee beans, and the croissants were stale. Repeat trade was the exception, not the rule. But there was one regular, and the moment he stepped through the door each morning, newspapers under his arm, the body on the counter would start pouring his cup. It didn’t matter how often the staff turned over: his details were passed down along with instructions about the cappuccino machine.
Beige raincoat. Thinning, brownish hair. Permanently irritated.
And, of course, those newspapers.

This morning, the windows were a fogged-over drizzle. His raincoat dripped on to the chessboard lino. If his newspapers hadn’t been in a plastic bag, they’d have been a papier-mâché sculpture waiting to happen.

‘Good morning.’

‘It’s a lousy morning.’

‘But it’s always good to see you, sir.’

This was the morning’s Max, a name they all shared as far as Robert Hobden was concerned. If they wanted him to tell them apart, they shouldn’t all work the same counter.

He settled in his usual corner. A redhead, one of only three other customers, was at the next table, facing the window: a black raincoat hung from the back of her chair. She wore a collarless white shirt and black leggings cut off at the ankle. He noticed this because her feet were hooked round her chair legs, the way a child might sit. A baby-sized laptop sat in front of her. She didn’t look up.

Max delivered his latte. Grunting acknowledgement, Hobden placed keys, mobile and wallet on the table in front of him, like always. He hated sitting with lumps in his pockets. His pen and notebook joined them. The pen was a thin-nibbed black felt-tip; the keyring a memory stick. And the newspapers were the quality dailies, plus the
Mail
. Piled up, they made a four-inch stack, of which he would read about an inch and a half; significantly less on Mondays, when there was more sports coverage. Today was Tuesday, shortly after seven. It was raining again. Had rained all night.

…
Telegraph
,
Times
,
Mail
,
Independent
,
Guardian
.

At one time or another, he’d written for all of these. That wasn’t so much a thought that occurred to him as an awareness that nudged him most mornings, round about now: cub reporter—ridiculous term—in Peterborough, then the inevitable shift to London, and the varied tempos of the major beats, crime and politics, before he ascended, aged forty-eight, to his due: the weekly column. Two, in fact. Sundays and Wednesdays. Regular appearances on
Question Time
. From firebrand to the acceptable face of dissent; an admittedly long trajectory in his case, but that made arrival all the sweeter. If he could have freeze-framed life back then, he’d have had little to complain about.

These days, he no longer wrote for newspapers. And when cab drivers recognized him, it was for the wrong reasons.

Beige raincoat discarded for the moment; the thinning, brownish hair a permanent accessory—as was the irritated look—Robert Hobden uncapped his pen, took a sip of his latte, and settled to work.

There’d been lights in the windows. Ho knew before opening the door that Slough House was occupied. But he’d have been able to tell anyway—damp footprints in the stairwell; the taste of rain in the air. Once in a harvest moon, Jackson Lamb would arrive before Ho; random predawn appearances that were purely territorial. You can haunt this place all you like, Lamb was telling him. But when they pull down the walls and count the bones, it’ll be mine they find on top. There were many good reasons for not liking Jackson Lamb, and that was one of Ho’s favourites.

But this wasn’t Lamb, or not Lamb alone. There was someone else up there.

Could be Jed Moody, but only if you were dreaming. Nine thirty was a good start for Moody, and it was generally eleven before he was ready for anything more complicated than a hot drink. Roderick Ho didn’t like Jed Moody, but that wasn’t a problem: Moody didn’t expect to be liked. Even before he’d been assigned to Slough House, he’d probably had fewer friends than fists. So Ho and Moody got on okay, sharing an office: neither liking the other, and neither caring the other knew. But there was no way Moody was here before him. It was barely seven.

Catherine Standish was more likely. Ho couldn’t remember Catherine Standish ever arriving first, which meant it had never happened, but she was usually next in. He’d hear the door’s agonized opening, and then her soft creak on the stairs, and then nothing. She was two floors above—in the small room next to Lamb’s—and out of sight, she was easy to forget. Actually, standing in front of you, she was easy to forget. The chances of sensing her presence weren’t good. So it wasn’t her.

That suited Ho. Ho didn’t like Standish.

He made his way up to the first floor. In his office he hung his raincoat on a hook, turned his computer on, then went into the kitchen. An odd smell was drifting down the stairs. Something rotten had replaced the taste of rain.

So here were the suspects: Min Harper, who was a nervous idiot, constantly patting his pockets to check he’d not lost anything; Louisa Guy, who Ho couldn’t look at without thinking of a pressure cooker, steam coming out of her ears; Struan Loy, the office joker—Ho didn’t like any of them, but he especially didn’t like Loy: office jokers were a crime in progress—and Kay White, who used to be on the top floor, sharing with Catherine, but had been banished downstairs for being ‘too damn noisy’: thanks, Lamb. Thanks for letting the rest of us suffer. If you can’t stand her chatter, why not pack her back to Regent’s Park? Except none of them were going back to Regent’s Park, because all of them had left a little bit of history over there; an ungainly smudge on the annals of the Service.

And Ho knew the shape and colour of each and every smudge: the crimes of drugs, drunkenness, lechery, politics and betrayal—Slough House was full of secrets, and Ho knew the size and depth of each and every one of them, excepting two.

Which brought him to Sid. It could be Sid up there.

And here was the thing about Sid Baker: Ho didn’t know what crime Sid was being punished for. It was one of two secrets that eluded him.

That was probably the reason he didn’t like Sid.

As the kettle boiled, Ho picked over some of Slough House’s secrets; thought about the nervous idiot Min Harper, who’d left a classified disk on a train. He might have got away with this if the disk’s pouch hadn’t been bright red, and stamped
Top Secret.
And also if the woman who’d found it hadn’t handed it in to the BBC. Some things were too good to be true, unless you were the one they were happening to: for Min Harper, the episode had been too awful to believe, but had happened anyway. Which was why Min had spent the last two years of a once-promising career in charge of the first-floor shredder.